Milano Tattoo Convention Day 3

I woke up at 9am on the dot and felt a lot better than the night before. I jumped in the shower, sprayed on my deodorant (that’s important to note because I couldn’t find gel anywhere. I’ve never used spray before and I’m not a fan...), through on my leather pants, and added a couple layers to my top. On my way out the door, I received a text from DanMarshall telling me that he was downstairs and had a taxi ready.

Dan, his wife, and I all got in the taxi and headed to a local flea market / vintage clothing store area of Milan. Dan’s wife wanted to do some shopping, so we dropper her off there, then we got into the Metro and headed uptown to the cemetery.

Exiting the metro, we used our natural innate sense of direction (obviously because we’re men =), to guide us to the cemetery. We even used the angle of the sun to determine time and direction. We were like friggin’ boy scouts. Just heavily tattooed, freaky looking, wearing black leather boy scouts =).

We came to the cemetery without a single wrong turn (because it was a straight line =). Again there was a no photography sign outside, but that was slightly ignored. Once stepping foot inside, there was no was not to take photos of these graves. They were the most amazing, over-the-top, massive, and decadent grave sites that I have ever seen. There wasn’t a single regular grave stone. Each one has their own bronze stature, or hand carved granite design. Those were the smaller ones. The more extravagant ones looked like miniature churches getting three or four stories high! Now most of these were family plots, or for couples. But there was one massive churchy-tomb thing that was for just one girl that had recently died. The amount of money people pour into the afterlife is amazing!

A lot of the statues were very depressing, but amazing pieces of art. Others just deserved hoaky commentary. I think we found sky diving jesus, new age jesus, Tim Burton jesus, High-Five Moses, and a few others that were kind of entertaining. There were two that really stuck out as modern pieces of art. They were very mechanical in nature. What made them even cooler was that they were made in the 1960’s. The designs of these rival any modern bio-mechanical art that’s been made in the last 20 years. On top of that, they’re grave markers!

There was one tomb that was just perplexing and gave almost no information to it’s meaning. It was an inclosure about thirty feet high and ten feet deep. It had astrological-like symbols and mathematical signs all over it. They looked more like a new type of math equation, or crop circle than anything I have seen before. There wasn’t even a handle to open the doors, just four finger holes carved into the stone. Wanting more answers, we found a window on the backside of it. Again, making no sense, as the back was surrounded by bushes and trees. No practical use for the window. Peering inside, we could just barely make out some gold text in a ring around the door. It was all in italian, so we didn’t know what it said, but one of the words was “occult”. This was a story I really wanted to know the end of, but will never get. Kind of like a song that’s stuck in your head. WHAT IS IT?!

The last area of the cemetery that we check out was back by the entrance, the burial ground for the Jews. They had their own walled off corner. Very walled off. Somewhere around 20+ feet high and ten feet thick. I wonder who wanted it that way, the christians or the jews